It's a Tamarin monkey. I stole this picture from Wikipedia.

This article on animal cannibalism and evolution has it all: Cane toads. Eating offspring and mates. Penises breaking off inside vaginas. Faking death in a sexual context. Basically, the ingredients of a good weekend. But that’s not all: mustached tamarians. They’re monkeys that have handlebar mustaches.

And that’s where it gets even more weird.

A mother tamarin holding her infant son was foraging for fruit with her adult daughter. One moment the charming tableau looked fine, baby monkey clinging adorably to mother’s fur. The next, the researchers watched as the mother bit through the baby’s skull and ate out its brain. And once the mother had polished off the entire head, her adult daughter partook of some shoulder.

[...]

The researchers propose that, in a way, the grisly act was an expression of maternal love. The adult daughter turned out to be pregnant at the time. Tamarin infants are so demanding that rearing them is a group affair, and if the mother’s infant survived, the daughter’s wouldn’t have a chance. Through a shared act of cannibalism, mother and daughter made their pact.

GRANDMA IS CRAZY. So you see, menopause is a good thing.

There are instructions on how to hypnotize a chicken on Instructables. It looks like it’s pretty easy. However, not everyone is cool with the idea of hypnotizing a chicken. Instructables user “kalmurat” says, “this instructable is sick. making fun of a living creature i would say even demonic. becoz these kind of things release negative energy.”

Well there you have it. That chicken is going to put a curse on you and you’ll have to buy soap from the store that sells Mexican occult stuff to wash it off.

This is a panda cub. I also stole this picture from Wikipedia.

There’s been a lot of effort to get giant pandas knocked up so that they won’t go extinct, but the animals don’t want to mate. There’s something about being in captivity that doesn’t make them want to mate. Like I don’t know, maybe the fact that they’re in an enclosure and everyone is watching them? They just aren’t into that sort of thing, I guess.

Anyway, the Edinburgh Zoo couldn’t get their pandas to bang this year. (They were “just friends” and wanted to do somersaults instead.) There was more luck in Japan.

“During the three days they spent together, the two pandas mated four times.”
That’s sort of TMI but it doesn’t sound like they’re really into each other. It’s not like pandas have anything to do all day.

“‘They make a nice couple,’ the official added.”
They’re PANDAS. Can you find me an ugly pair of pandas?

Various flora in the Sonoran Desert, taken at Saguaro National Park in Arizona.

Cactus at sunset in Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.

Prickly pear cactus during sunset at Sagauro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.

Interior of a dead saguaro cactus, or maybe it was a prickly pear cactus—I can’t remember. Taken in Sagauro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.

I am completely fascinated by these foreign flora, the cactus. I’ve never experienced them except as small houseplants or exotic greenhouse plants in Minnesota. This is Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona. The saguaro is the (stereotypical?) cactus with the arms sticking up. It is completely alien to me that these should simply grow out of the ground and even tower high above me. I also find them biologically bizarre.

What is most valuable is the raw data, which is available for download in a non-proprietary format. Through using 3rd-party software with the raw data, I’ve been able to learn more than 23andMe reveals. (The raw data also comes in very handy if you’re not 100% European because 23andMe has a self-acknowledged Eurocentric model.)

For example, how Neanderthal I am from Interpretome: 11 out of 84 identified Neanderthal SNPs. I like the little meter it uses.

Interpretome is a great resource for digging through your raw data since it involves using your browser, instead of downloading and installing something such as R and then running available scripts. Not everyone is comfortable with the latter so the Interpretome interface makes it highly recommended.

Some things I learned from 23andMe:

• I’m 100% European.
• My mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup is H11, from “Central Europe.”
• Compared to average, I have nearly twice the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and about 1.5x the risk for Coronary Heart Disease, lung cancer, Restless Legs Syndrome, and ulcerative colitis.
• I have an “increased risk” of gout and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
• I’m not a carrier for any of the various things they tested for: Cystic Fibrosis, Tay-Sach’s, Connexin 26-related sensorineural hearing loss, etc.
• I am norovirus-resistant.
• My blood type is likely B (it’s B positive).
• My eyes are likely brown (they’re green).
• I’m not resistant to HIV/AIDS.

Some things I learned from the raw data + third parties:

• I have 19 “European alleles” and 1 “East Asian allele,” whatever that means. (Interpretome)
• At maximum: my ancestry is 93% Northwestern European, 7% Southeastern European, 0% Ashkenazi Jewish. (Euro-DNA-Calc)
• I have 11 out of 84 identified Neanderthal SNPs (as seen above from Interpretome)
• From Doug McDonald’s BGA Project (search the 23andMe forums for his email address):
  

  Most likely fit is 43.0% (+-  6.4%) Europe (various subcontinents) and 57.0% (+-  6.4%) Europe (all Northeast Europe), which is 100% total Europe. The following are possible population sets and their fractions, most likely at the top.

  Italian= 0.386 Lithuani= 0.614
  Spain= 0.381 Lithuani= 0.619
  French= 0.538 Lithuani= 0.462
  French= 0.416 Belorus= 0.584

  For some reason the above and the spot on the map, which both look like Germany, seem to contradict the scatter plot, which looks quite like plain England. So I would say that it could be anywhere from England to Germany.

• I have 21 out of 32 Coronary Artery Disease risk alleles. (Interpretome)
• I have 19 out of 36 Type 2 Diabetes risk alleles. (Interpretome)
• My combined risk of narcolepsy and Restless Leg Syndrome is 3.63x the average. (Interpretome)
• I have a ton of alleles associated with an elevated risk for mental health issues (such as depression, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia), and being less likely than average to respond to certain antidepressant medications. (Promethease)

A couple other things you can do with your 23andMe raw data involve submitting it to CureTogether or GEDmatch, and cross-referencing your SNP data using the FireFox extension SNPTips. If all four of your grandparents are from the same background, you can use DIYDodecad. (Mine aren’t, so I didn’t use it.)

By the way: my advice is not to pay full price for a kit, but to wait for it to go on sale because this seems to happen pretty frequently. The wait isn’t long for them to process your sample (of your spit inside a tube), it was only three weeks for me. “6-8 weeks” is the maximum time frame given.

This month, Roger Ebert writes a review of Ben Stein’s “Expelled.” But it’s not exactly a review, it’s more of a smackdown. Reading Ebert’s post made me remember when my friend sent me some Creationist materials from some presentation she saw. Amongst other things, it said that evolution was a lie made up by the devil and that it influenced, and was supported by, the Nazis. Huh. Interesting how we never hear about the latter from anyone but Creationists, perhaps because it’s not true. It sure does seem to be a staple of anti-evolution beliefs, though, a slippery slope from evolution to atheism to becoming Hitler (who identified as a Christian, but whatever):

Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it “From Darwin to Hitler.” He finds a Creationist who informs him, “Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism.” He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

However, I have a couple bones to pick:

• Mr. Ebert missed a chance to educate readers on what “theory” means in a scientific context. Most Creationists don’t understand a meaning other than by its layperson definition. In science, a theory is knowledge based upon observable evidence. So for example, evolution is both a theory and a fact. By saying, “Evolution is just a theory” you could just as well say, “Gravity is just a theory.” Yet most Creationists don’t take issue with accepting gravity as the reason why things fall down.
• He also missed a chance to explain how evolution does not cover how life originated on Earth; that study would be abiogenesis.